Advertising on Facebook and Instagram

Background

Facebook has over 2.7 billion users globally each month since its first version was launched in early 2004, and it's the only social platform that has over half of all social media users. Facebook's website is the third most visited site in the world, after Google and YouTube, and Facebook’s app was the second most downloaded app after TikTok in 2020, according to statistics from Hootsuite. Today's Facebook users spend an average of nearly 34 minutes on the platform every day.

About ten years ago, Instagram was launched, and today the app has over a billion active users every month worldwide. The app is used by 51% women and 49% men, spending on average 30 minutes on the app each day. Of these, 81% of users use the app to search for products or services. Nearly 130 million of those using the app click on posts related to shopping every month.

The Growth of Paid Advertising

For ten years, we’ve been able to use paid advertising in social channels. Advertising is a cost-effective way to reach more than just your followers and engage with new leads. Advertising in social channels has opened new business opportunities and contributed to the growth of e-commerce.

Opportunities with Advertising on Facebook and Instagram

Advertising through Facebook Family of Apps offers the potential to reach the right target audience by having a large database of Facebook users and building your audiences. You can create audiences based on interests, demographics, age, and then create lookalike audiences from your existing customers.

These are audiences with similar interests and behaviors to your already qualified audiences. Once you've gathered data about the audience, you can also work smartly with remarketing through the pixel on your website. Your advertising can help you with tasks like driving conversions, increasing website traffic, strengthening brand awareness, and building loyalty with both potential and existing customers or recruiting new employees.

What You Need to Start Advertising on Facebook and Instagram

The first step to start advertising is to create a business account in Facebook Business Manager and then create a company page, after which you can create an ad account in Business Manager. You must use the same information you used when creating your company page.

To measure your advertising, we recommend having the technical implementation in place before your campaign goes live. This is to see what your audience interacts with in your advertisement. On Facebook, you can install a pixel, where you choose what to measure - called events. The pixel also allows you to create retargeting campaigns.

Strategy for Your Advertising

This is a basic strategy for your advertising on the platform. Below, we go step by step through what you should consider when starting your advertising.

Goal You need a goal for your advertising to know what you want to achieve. It could be that you want to drive more conversions, increase brand awareness, get the audience to download your app, etc.

Target Audience Based on what you already know about your audience, such as age, geographic location, or habits.

Content You need visually appealing content with a message to reach and gain attention from your target audience.

Period You should consider holidays or other events when choosing the campaign period. There is often high competition among advertisers and therefore more expensive.

Budget Setting a budget means you never have to pay more than you intended, you can choose to set a daily budget or a lifetime budget for the period your ads will run.

Format There are six flexible ad formats to choose from, and they are designed to work on all devices. You decide whether to show an image or video. You can read more about the format below in this post.

Step by Step: Advertising on Facebook and Instagram

In Facebook Ads Manager, you’ll launch your campaign and create your first ads:

Step 1 – Choose a Goal for Your Campaign

Brand Awareness You can choose between brand awareness and reaching many people who might be interested in your brand. In this step, you work with a cold audience, whom you want to engage with your brand.

App Installs, Traffic, Lead Generation In this step, you target an already prospected (warm) audience who you want to download your app, visit your website, sign up for more information about your company, contact through messages, engage with your posts, or watch your video to increase interest.

Step 2 – Choose Your Audiences

You can choose from three tools to build your audience:

Main Audience - Audiences based on age, interests, geography, etc.

Custom Audience – based on users who have interacted with your company, for instance, by visiting your website.

Lookalike Audiences – Audiences you create through your customers’ interests.

Step 3 – Choose Placements

Facebook for Business recommends including Instagram advertising if you’re creating ads for Facebook where the campaign goal also supports Instagram. This way you optimize delivery. Choosing automatic placements in Facebook Ads Manager is preferred as Facebook optimizes your budget for the placements that perform best for maximum results.

Facebook News Feed: Your ads appear in the news feed on your desktop when people go to Facebook's website on their computers. Your ads appear in the news feed on mobile devices when people use the Facebook app on mobile devices or open Facebook's website in a mobile browser.

Instagram Feed: Your ads appear in the mobile feed when people use the Instagram app on mobile devices. Instagram feed ads only show up to those using the Instagram app.

Facebook Marketplace: Your ads appear on the Marketplace home page or when someone browses the Marketplace in the Facebook app.

Facebook Video Feeds: Your video appears between organic videos in video-only environments on Facebook Watch and in Facebook's news feed.

Facebook Right Column: Your ads appear in the right column on Facebook. Right column ads only show to people connecting to Facebook on their computer.

Instagram – Explore: Your ads appear when someone clicks on a photo or video.

Messenger Inbox: Your ads appear on the Home tab in Messenger.

A recommendation for more views in your advertising is to include Audience Network so you can reach more people through other apps at a lower cost.

Your ads appear in external apps.

Audience Network Native, Banner and Interstitial Your ads appear in Audience Network apps. Find out more about banner ads, interstitial ads, and integrated adverts.

Rewarded Video for Audience Network Your ads appear as videos that people can watch in exchange for rewards in an app (like currency or items in the app). Find out more about rewarded video.

Dynamic Ads

Dynamic ads are for you as an e-merchant, who has a wide range and doesn’t want to create lots of ad sets, but what your dynamic ads help you with is to automatically deliver services and offers to a relevant target audience. They work the same way as other ads where you can choose both placement and goal.

If you are at the beginning of your customer journey, where you want to reach a wide range of cold audiences who haven’t yet bought anything from your business, you can reach them through dynamic ads. But you can also reach the audience that has interacted with your products by encouraging them to convert.

Step 4 - Budget

Daily Budget: is the average amount you want to spend on an ad set or campaign each day and there is no limit.

Lifetime Budget: The total amount you are willing to spend over the entire campaign or ad set. The lifetime budget has a fixed limit and no average per day like the daily budget has.

Step 5 - Format

Depending on the content and what your message is in your ads, you can choose from the following formats:

Image – Display engaging images with appealing click-friendly text.

Video - Evoke emotions through storytelling and tell your story in a moving format.

Stories – Inspire your audience through a mobile-friendly format.

Messenger - Connect with your audience.

Carousel – Show up to ten images, each with its own link.

Slideshow – Video-like ads consist of movement, sound, and text.

Collection - Your audience can browse and discover among your offerings.

Playable – Ads offering a preview before downloading your app.

Now you’re ready to create your campaign!

Step 6 - Measure Your Advertising

To see what works or doesn't work in your advertising, you need to track some key metrics, also called KPIs. These are to ensure your goal is achieved.

These are the most common KPIs:

Reach – How much exposure do your ads have?

Click-through Rate – How many people click on your ad?

Cost per Click – How much does each click on your ad cost?

Frequency – How many times does your audience see your ad per week?

Video Engagement Rate – How many people engage with your ads through video view length?

Traffic – How many leads does your website generate for your ads?

ROAS - What is your return on ad spend?

Conversions – How many conversions happen through your ads?

Cost per Action – What is the cost per lead?

A/B Testing To see what your audience interacts with and engages with, you can create two similar ads but change small details like color, copy, language, etc. Then you can evaluate what attracts your audience and optimize your ads.

Summary

Achieving results in your advertising takes time. You need to give your advertising at least six months to get to know your target audience, know what formats work, budget distribution, etc. But it’s important to dare to aim for that. There’s no one-size-fits-all result in advertising other than guidelines for how it should be done. The media landscape is constantly changing and just because your content works today doesn't mean it will work tomorrow.

Hope you liked the article. Don’t forget to stay updated by subscribing to our newsletter!